The present invention relates to toy furniture and the creation of simulated doll house type rooms for children's play and, more particularly, to a system, method and kit which utilizes a combination of predetermined structural shapes which can be arranged and transformed into a multitude of different types of furniture along with wallboards and other accessories to create a simulated room for play with toy dolls and the like. The present invention also includes a plurality of slipcovers adaptable for placement over at least some of the predetermined structural shapes, the slipcovers including indicia thereon to simulate specific furniture items as well as appliances and other home/business furnishings.
Doll houses, toy houses, toy furniture and other furnishings for designing a simulated doll house type room such as a kitchen, bedroom, parlor, living room and so forth are well known in the art. It is known to provide toy houses having internal partitions or walls dividing the interior of the house into a plurality of miniature rooms having floors, ceilings and upright walls. It is also known to provide wall and floor boards having various patterns and indicia associated therewith to simulate the walls and floor coverings of a particular room such as windows, fixtures and other features associated with a particular room including accessories that can be cooperatively attached to the wallboards, various furnishings such as simulated windows, mantels, pictures, mirrors and various types of other fixtures including simulated furniture. It is also well known to provide miniature toy furniture such as chairs, couches, beds, stoves and so forth along with miniature toy furnishings such as rugs, pictures and the like wherein a child can place these items in a doll house or in a simulated room arrangement in positions that simulate a realistic home/business setting.
Almost all of the toy furniture for use in doll type house and simulated room settings are specific furniture pieces. In other words, such toy furniture has a single purpose, that is, it represents a specific piece of furniture such as a chair, table, bed, sofa and so forth. As a result, a multitude of different types of specific furniture items must be purchased in order to furnish specific simulated room settings. This can be quite expensive. Although dual-purpose toy furniture assemblies are known in the art, such assemblies are extremely limited in function and application. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,624,649 discloses a toy furniture device adapted from a couch arrangement to a fold-down bed arrangement. The device includes a box-shaped main frame member within which a bed member is pivotally supported, the bed member being pivotally movable between a stored position within the main frame member to define a couch configuration and a folded-down position wherein it extends substantially perpendicular from the main frame member to define the bed arrangement. Although this particular piece of toy furniture is convertible, it's dual purpose is limited to a couch and bed arrangement and it is not transformable into other desired furniture configurations. As such, the known toy furniture assemblies are not designed to be transformable into a plurality of different, separate, distinct furniture items. As a result, there is generally no utility to single or dual-purpose toy furniture assemblies beyond the singular or dual purpose for which they are designed. None of the known toy furniture constructions provides a child with a compact and easy manipulative arrangement of components which permits simple and yet entertaining conversion between desired furniture configurations.
Thus, there is a need for multi-functional toy furniture which can be used for numerous applications and can be placed in a variety of different room settings. It is also desirable to provide toy furniture which can be handled with ease by even young children, and which affords sufficient novelty so as to entertain children even after many hours of play.